punchdrunkmom

Tent or no tent—there is no “why”

I chaperoned a field trip to the zoo last week. I would have taken some pictures to show you guys, but Kai filled up my camera memory card with gems like this:

and this:

and this:

and therefore had I to be satisfied with actual memories. Which is fine, because I spent most of the day yelling at Kai anyway.

He bolted from me on numerous occasions. Like I’d take my eyes off of him for one second to look at a cheetah or something, and then rake the sea of pre-schoolers for his yellow shirt, and “Oh, crap!” I’d say. “Where’s Kai?”

At one point, I found him in the sea lion tunnel and read him the riot act for disappearing, only to have a woman I’d never seen before, and who was the only other person in the tunnel, introduce herself as a parent at our school. She recognized me as being on the PTO board. Blurgh. Oh yes, hi. I’m Angry McYellsatmykidinpublic. It’s so nice to meet you.

:::

The other boy I was watching was the opposite of Kai that day. He planted his feet firmly and informed me that he hadn’t had enough breakfast to walk fast.

I think I might try that with Kai next time.

:::

It’s always interesting to me to interact with children other than my own. They always tell me that I hold their hands too tightly, the result of my habit of holding Kai’s hand in a death grip to keep him from bolting. (One girl solved that problem by wrapping her hand around my little finger after she told me I was crushing hers.) They tend to resent having to spend the morning trying to chase after Kai. Go figure. And they talk! Way more than Kai ever has.

I got into one of those “why” conversations with the other boy. Kai has asked me exactly one “why” question in his entire life. And as chatty as he is sometimes, we pass a lot of time in a sort of companionable Piscean silence.

There was a large tent in the main square at the zoo, next to the lions. And if Kai were to ask about it, he might say, “What is that?” To which I might reply, “That’s a tent, honey.” If there were to be any further discussion, Kai might say, “Oh, a tent.”

And that would be it. No matter what else he thought or didn’t think about the tent, there would be no more discussion.

The other kid, though—the neurotypical one—that kid wouldn’t let the whole tent thing just die.

Kid: What’s that?

Me: That’s a tent.

Kid: What’s it for?

Me: It’s, you know, to keep the sun and rain off of people.

Kid: What’s it made of?

Me: Um, canvas. Like an oiled canvas.

Kid: What’s canvas?

Me: It’s a heavy material for tents.

Kid: What’s that?

Me: It’s a pole.

Kid: What’s on the pole?

Me: I think it’s the same canvas as the tent wrapped around the pole.

Kid: What’s that?

Me: It’s a strap to lash the tent to the ground.

Kid: But it looks like a belt.

Me: Mmm.

Kid: Why does it look like a belt?

Me: (pretending not to hear)

Kid: (louder) Why does it look like a belt?

Me: (sigh) Because those buckle things keep the tension in the strap.

Kid: Why?

Me: To keep the tent from falling down.

Kid: Why do they want to keep the sun and rain off of people?

Me: Because some people don’t like being wet or hot.

Kid: What if the tent falls down?

Me: It won’t.

Kid: But if it fell down, how would the people get out?

Me: They’d have to crawl out from under the tent.

Kid: But how?

Me: Well, they’d have to work pretty hard at it, I guess.

Kid: What if they couldn’t get out?

Me: Then it would be a lot like this conversation.

Kid: Why?

Me: Who's ready for lunch?

:::

When I picked Kai up from school later that day, I loaded him in the car and asked him what he’d liked best at the zoo.

“The giraffes,” he chirped happily.

“They were pretty cool,” I said.

I waited for him to elaborate, but of course, he did not.

So I turned on NPR, and in a warm, familiar silence, we drove home.

 

Oh, sit

So Kai’s been cursing. 

Most people don’t seem to catch it, because it’s subtle.

“Oh, sit,” he says.

But I know exactly what he means.

When his marble roller coaster collapses.

“Oh, sit.”

When his guy dies during Temple Run.

“Oh, sit.”

When he spills his water.

“Oh, sit.”

Of course, I know where he gets it, too.

When I spill coffee.

"Oh, shit."

When I take a wrong turn.

"Oh, shit."

When I realized that this was entirely my fault.

"Oh. Oh, shit."

:::

It’s consistent, applied appropriately and I kind of don’t know what to do about it.

For one thing, I don’t know how on Earth I would manage to convey to him that it’s okay to say “shit” at home but not at school. I don’t even want to acknowledge that it’s not entirely appropriate language, for fear that he’ll use it all the more just to get attention.

And then, of course, there are levels of appropriateness. Someone suggested that it wouldn’t be right to use that language at Grandma’s, for example. This is funny because when Grandma loses during her video game, she says, “Oh, shit,” too.

And, obviously, I need to start modeling better language. Oh, shoot. Gosh darn it.

Son of a witch.

I don’t know what I’ll call people who get on my nerves in traffic, though. “Get the heck out of my way, you idiot!” doesn’t feel like it carries the same weight as it might with a few well-chosen, um, sentence enhancers.

Plus, the kids need to learn how to drive in Chicago. At least I can do a good job modeling that.

 

Sugar and spice and everything sucks

Hey! How's it going?

Everything here

sucks

more

than

you

can

put

into

words.

At least, according to my daughter.

Just this morning, she threw a tantrum because she wanted to watch Diego. Then she threw one because her doll was in another room. And another when she got her tiara stuck in Kai’s basketball net (that’s not even sort of a lie, btw).

She wants to sit in Kai's car seat, not hers. She wants the dinosaur placemat. No! Not that dinosaur placemant! THAT dinosaur placemat! She doesn't want to wear a coat. Or walk down the stairs on her own. Or up the stairs on her own. Then she doesn't want to be carried. Or hold my hand.

It's constant. It’s nails on a chalkboard, a sharp stick in your eye, an oh-my-God-child-stop-crying-over-this-because-it’s-so-so-not-something-to-cry-over.

Everything is horrible. Horrible!

She can snap out of it pretty fast, though.

“Oh, I don’t like the way you’re talking,” I’ll say.

“Mooooooommmmmmmmmmyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.” Tears squeeze out of her eyes.

“Say, ‘Help, please!’”

And she’ll stop crying and brighten up. “Hep, peas,” she chirps.

“Dynamite,” I’ll say. “But maybe you don’t want to play basketball in a tiara.”

But hey. What do I know?

:::

I suppose that this is because she's two and a half, and that with time she'll realize that not everything is a total and complete disaster.

Or maybe she'll learn that every time she has a tantrum I'll whip out  my phone and take a picture and put it in my blog.

I guess it's cool either way, right?

While you were sleeping

“Mommy,” he said, “I covered in numbers!”

I floated toward consciousness, trying to orient myself. It was pitch black outside, not yet dawn.

I opened a bleary eye. It was 4:30 in the morning.

He was standing next to my bed, naked from head to toe, and, as advertised, he was covered in numbers he'd drawn on his body. In the dim light from the hallway I could make them out, zero to nine across his belly, a jumble down his legs, his feet. I would discover later that the bottoms of his feet were covered, too. Red numbers and black and green. He looked like he could be a villain from the old Batman TV show—the Numerator.

He climbed into bed with me, and after about an hour, during which he flopped around and counted my toes and pulled out strands of my hair, he fell asleep.

Somewhere in the fog, I wondered where he’d gotten the markers. What had he been doing?

I hoped he’d found the Sharpies or the dry erase markers, because the alternative meant that he’d been into his art box.

Which we keep upstairs.

On the top shelf of the closet.

Where he can’t get it.

And I fell asleep again, too.

:::

He was still asleep and still covered in numbers when I finally stopped hitting snooze and swung my feet to the floor.

I wondered how long he’d been up during the night, why I hadn’t heard him until he came into our room.

I passed his bedroom on my way to the kitchen for coffee. It was trashed, toys everywhere, baskets overturned. I was about to straighten up when I heard Scott calling me from the kitchen.

“Megan,” he said, and I knew it was a bad sign, because though it’s my name, he only uses it when he’s upset about something.

“Megan, come look at this.”

I started up the stairs, Scott’s cursing getting louder with each step.

And when I got to the top, I understood why.

Food and plates and trash were everywhere. Kai had pushed a chair to the closet and retrieved his art box, and crayons and markers littered the floor. He’d made a train track. The sink in the bathroom was full of water, a pound of strawberries and a pint of blueberries floating in it. Several egg shells were discarded on the carpet. There were cupcake crumbs everywhere. Sprinkles were ground into the slate floor of the kitchen.

He had eaten two entire Lunchables, two cupcakes, several hardboiled eggs, and some vanilla Pillsbury frosting right out of the container. He’d dumped six snack-sized containers of Jello onto a paper plate, and eaten most of it.

He’d found a book of stamps and stuck them to the furniture. He’d placed something that looked like fresh dill in Henry Fish’s bowl. I have no idea what it was.  He filled his backpack with toys. He tried to change the batteries in one of his cars.

He was, in other words, awake and unsupervised, in the middle of the night, for a long, long time.

Scott grumbled loudly as we began to put things away, throw things out, fish produce from the bathroom sink. He was mad—mad at Kai, at the situation.

I wasn’t mad, though. That stuff doesn't make me mad anymore. At least, not at Kai. I was glad that he’d trashed the house instead of leaving it, of grabbing car keys or trying to go the playground. And I was glad that when he was finally ready to go back to sleep, he came down and curled up next to me.

And once the initial shock wore off, Scott was thinking along those same lines, too.

“He could have burned the house down,” he said. “He could try to make eggs and set himself on fire.”

:::

I picked him up early from school for OT. He was in the nap room, and for once he was actually napping. Passed out cold may be a more accurate description.

I went to his classroom to grab his backpack and coat and his teacher and I talked.

“He was fine today,” she said. I’d told her about our night. “In group, he stood up and lifted up his shirt and said, ‘I got numbers!’”

:::

I’ve placed his gate back over his door. I’d hoped we were done with it, but that was, apparently, wishful thinking. I put away toys, put his art box back on the top shelf of the closet. The marker doesn’t want to wash off, so he still looks like the Numerator, though they did fade a little in the tub.

All day, I’d been weighed down by the idea that I have a huge problem to solve—how to keep him asleep and how to keep him safe when he’s awake like that. I have some ideas, like clonidine and GPS ankle bracelets that emit an alarm if Kai goes beyond a certain distance, finding a way to Kai-proof the front door and the stove. None of it’s easy or appealing. None of it’s cheap. Well, except for the pills.

On the plus side, the cleaning lady was scheduled to come that afternoon.

Thank goodness for small miracles.

 

An unreliable narrator and his cow, Butterscotch

So I’ve mentioned that Kai’s been answering questions lately. Where he used to just ignore you, he’ll now tell you what he had for dinner or how many Easter eggs he got in his basket.

The problem is that he doesn’t answer any of those questions correctly.

On Monday, Kai’s OT informed me that Kai told her that the Easter Bunny brought him 13 eggs. This was not true, for not only did he not get 13 eggs, the Easter Bunny didn’t even visit our house.

Kai’s teacher will text me about things Kai says at school. We’re working on getting him to share for circle time, so when he tells the class something, she often hits me up for verification.

“Did he have toast and eggs and strawberries for dinner last night?” she asked me today. That’s what he told his class he ate.

And the answer is no. No he didn’t. That’s not even what he had for breakfast this morning.

It’s not that he’s lying. At least I don’t think so. I think it’s because of his relationship with time. Kai seems to exist solely in the here and now.

:::

Yesterday, his teacher sent me the following picture of Kai leading the group through story time:

 

The message said that he’d held the book, which was narrated on a tape.

I asked him about it last night.

“Did you read a story to your class?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

I tickled him. “Really? You didn’t hold a book for story time?”

He broke into a wide grin.

“At school,” he said.

ZOMG!

“Yes! At school! You held the book!”

I decided to press him.

“What was the book about?” I asked him.

“Cows,” he replied.

I called his teacher later that night.

“Was the book about cows?” I asked.

“Close,” she said. “It was Ferdinand the Bull.”

I decided that was close enough for me. Kai's a city kid. I’m not going to split hairs over the difference between a cow and a bull.

:::

Later, I tried to get him to tell Scott about the story.

“Did you read a story to your class?” I asked.

This time, I didn’t get an answer.

“About the cows?” I prompted.

Kai laughed. “No,” he said.

I gave it one last shot.

“What was the cow’s name?” I asked.

“Butterscotch!” Kai chirped.

Now, I’m not going to lie to you guys. I don’t think I’ve ever read the story about Ferdinand the Bull. For all I know he’s got a wife named Butterscotch.

I texted his teacher to see if there was a Butterscotch in the story.

“No, sorry,” she texted back.

So I guess we’re still working on it.

“No Butterscotch,” I told Scott.

We thought about this for a moment or two, both of us maybe a little disappointed about the answer.

“I don’t know where he came up with it, but it’s a damn good name for a cow,” Scott said, finally.

And it is. It really, really is.

 

Big mother is watching

Kai got hurt on the playground today—feelings hurt. 

His teacher texted me about it.

“Very sad,” she texted. “He was crying and he kept saying 'I can't find her, I can't find her.' I said who and he said 'Mommy.'”

Well, if that won't break your heart, what will?

It crossed my mind to go to his school and give him a hug, but then I remembered that it was 2012. I texted her a message: “Here, show him this:”

 

She showed the picture to him.

He was silent for a few minutes, and then, his hurt apparently forgotten, he said, “Why is Mommy in your phone?”

Click. Problem solved.

And you know what?

It’s not the worst thing for him to think I’m everywhere.

 

 

Call me

Kai had a playdate over spring break with his friend Jovan—“Yogan,” he calls him.

They have become inseperable at school--on the playground, at lunch. Jovan even follows Kai's picture schedule during their work period.

They are Thermos twins, as Kai realized happily. They both have the same Toy Story version. "It's a match!" Kai said.

And it is.

It was only after Jovan left that I realized how well they had communicated. They built train tracks and played in Kai’s costume bin—Jovan was Woody, Kai was Green Crayon. Their conversations were fluid and natural, so much so that I didn’t think about Kai’s language deficits until I understood that they hadn’t been an issue at all.

As I was cleaning up, I accidentally swept one of Jovan’s trains up with all of Kai’s. We didn’t realize it until they were gone. This was a week ago, but for some reason, Kai got a bee in his bonnet and decided to look for it on Friday night.

“Find Jovan’s train,” he said.

It was in the first bin he searched.

“Jovan’s train!” he shouted. “Need call Jovan.”

This was a complete surprise. I hadn’t ever seen him show the slightest interest in using the phone for something other than Angry Birds. In fact, attempts to talk with him on the phone have yielded weak results at best. He might tell you what’s on his mind in that exact moment, but he’ll bookend it with babble and drop the phone on the floor, something like, “Deedle, beetle eat ice cream, fizzle waddle zoom,” crash.

But he rustled up a landline receiver and began punching in numbers. This seemed like a good time for a lesson in using the phone—a teachable moment, as it were.

“You have to press certain numbers in order to contact Jovan,” I said, scrolling through e-mails to find his mother’s cell.

I read off the numbers for him to press, and grabbed another receiver. While the line was still ringing, Kai started talking.

“Jovan! We found your train! Your train! It’s right here!”

“Honey, you have to wait for Jovan to answer the phone.”

Jovan’s mom answered her cell.

“Jovan, we have your train!” Kai said.

“Kai, you have to wait for Jovan.”

I greeted his mother and explained about the train and that Kai wanted to call her son.  She called him to her and gave him the phone.

“Hello?” Jovan said.

Kai held the phone to his ear, but by this time, it seemed like he had lost interest in the call. Dora was on or some such, something about elephants. One second became several and then a lot of time seemed to pass. I had no idea where this whole phone call thing was headed, so I rushed to fill the silence.

“Jovan,” I said. “We found your train and Kai will bring it to school on Monday.”

There was silence on the other end, but Kai seemed to remember his purpose.

“Jovan, I found your train!”

Jovan still hadn’t said anything, and just when I was about to ask him to put his mom back on the phone, he said, “Thanks.”

And of course, dear Jovan, for this miracle of appropriate communication, it is I who should be thanking you. You’re welcome to come over and play any time.

We’ll call you.

Parenting from such great heights

Kai wanted to go, and I didn’t give it a second thought.

I don’t know why. It’s not like I don’t know this about myself.

But I arranged for us to go. I stashed Ryan with my mother and held Kai’s hand as we walked up the stairs. I paid the fee, we waited in line. It wasn’t until I was strapped into the harness that I began to have doubts, like knowing you hate broccoli and ordering broccoli. Nothing good is going to come of it.

:::

It’s called the Ghostly Gangplank—a series of ladders and rope bridges and rickety platforms that crisscross and ascend several stories. It’s part of Nickelodeon Universe at the Mall of America. We had been content to ride things like Blue’s Skidoo and the Big Rig toddler-sized semi-trucks, but Kai had an agenda.

He didn’t have the language to ask me to go on the ride. Rather, he made a break for the stairs leading to it and pointed:

:::

You had to be 42 inches tall to go, and his cowlick just grazed the magic line. 

He followed every direction. He waited patiently in line, he held his arms out obligingly when the guy put on his harness. It was similar to a rock climbing harness, or so I imagine, never having done that particular activity myself.

You see, I am deathly afraid of heights.

I am so afraid of heights that I freaked out at the Sears Tower when Kai and Ryan leaned their foreheads against the glass of the viewing windows. I’m so afraid of heights that I can’t step out on to the kind of balcony with a grated floor. Fire escapes send me into palpitations. I’m so afraid of heights that I was a damn fool for agreeing to take Kai on the god damned Ghostly Gangplank.

I realized my mistake the moment I stepped onto the stairs—foot-wide planks with ropes to hold on to as you go up.

Kai was fine. He flew up the stairs to the narrow platform.

“Wait for Mommy,” I panted.

My palms were sweaty.

I was officially freaking out.

The object was to play around on the structure and then find your way down to the ground on one of two enclosed slides.

I surveyed the landscape, trying to determine my best option. It looked like I could go up two more flights of stairs and across a wooden bridge to get to the slide and off this horrible thing. I’d deal with my claustrophobia inside a tube slide when I had to. One irrational fear at a time, right?

Kai was impatient to move on.

“Wet’s go, Mommy!”

Wet’s go, indeed.

We went up the next staircase.

The next platform was kind of crowded and swaying slightly (!). There was a dad there, cheering on his own kids, one of whom was afraid of heights, too.

“One more flight, then an easy bridge,” he said to his kid.

One more flight, then an easy bridge. I could do this. I could do this for Kai.

But on the way up that third flight of stairs, I realized something fundamental:  this was the most freaking horrible thing I’ve ever done. It was a living nightmare, even—chasing what matters to me most through my personal hell.

I surveyed the “easy bridge” from the platform. Kids and parents were backed up behind me. I did my best not to look down, which did help a little, but the bridge wasn’t a solid surface. Rather, it was designed to look rickety, so you had to watch where you put your feet, i.e. look down. I watched someone step onto it, and it swayed under his weight.

“Oh, my God, it moves,” I said.

And I knew we were done.

“Honey,” I said to Kai, “I’m so sorry, we have to go down the stairs. Right now.”

“Are you okay?” the guy behind me asked.

I turned to him. I kept my face neutral. I even smiled pleasantly. But what I said was, “No, no I’m not and I have to get off this thing right now.”

“You can go across the bridge with him, if you want to,” he said. “Did they tell you that?” I looked at him. He seemed like a nice enough guy. There were several people behind him, kids and parents and daredevil teenagers all waiting for me to get out of the way. This made it all ten times worse, knowing I had to move and knowing that my only options were going back down the stairs or across the bridge.  Kai was waiting so patiently. And I considered it. I really, really did.

I pictured myself trying to parent Kai across a swinging bridge seven stories off the ground. He seemed fine up there, not nervous at all, but as scared as I was for myself, Kai being up here with me was more than I could stand. 

Kai dutifully went down the stairs with me. He didn’t argue or protest, just stepped carefully from one step to the other, then onto the platform, and down again. If he knew I was afraid, he didn’t show it. If he was disappointed, he didn’t let me know.

:::

The slide has a regular staircase that you can access from terra firma. Even these stairs unnerved me, though Kai bounded up the spiral steps like they were nothing. I wanted to stop at the third platform, but he pressed on for the fifth, for the tallest slide.

And I?

“I’ll be waiting for you at the bottom, Monkeyman,” I said.

I released my grip on his arm, and I turned around and climbed back down to the ground.

And when he emerged from the slide, flushed and grinning, I congratulated him on being so, so brave. I hoped he’d waited his turn, that he hadn’t given the attendant a hard time, that he’d kept his hands wrapped around his shoulders like he was supposed to.

I had no idea what happened up there.

I just…let him go.

And he was fine. He did just fine.

“Go again,” he said.

And though my mother was waiting, and Ryan was tired and the slide line took forever and even looking at the fifth floor platform from down here was causing my heart to speed up unpleasantly, I ruffled his hair and said, “Sure.”

 

Are you ready for an autistic child? Take the Punchdrunk Autism Readiness Challenge today!

Welcome to the Punchdrunk Autism Readiness Program! Recent data indicate that autism is on the rise! Could your child be the 1 in 88? Or 1 in 54 for boys? If so, please take the time to read our Autism Preparedness Guide! It’s your resource for everything you need to know to survive an epidemic laying waste to a generation of children, I mean not happening, I mean look over there! It’s a new DSM!

Think you’re ready to care for a child with autism? Spend a few days with this handy guide and get ready for your very own special needs child. Results will vary.

Readiness Activity 1: Are you covered?
Supplies: a phone, a phone book.

Autism is expensive! Speech therapy is $180 a session. Occupational therapy is $180 a session. ABA therapy is a bargain at $175. You will do these activities a minimum of once a week for many, many years. How do you pay for this you ask? Here’s an activity to get the ball rolling.

Using your phone and phone book, randomly open pages and call various numbers. Ask the strangers who answer the phone to pay for your child’s occupational, speech and behavioral therapy. Listen to them hang up on you. This method is very similar to the experience calling your insurance company, and often yields the same or better results.

Readiness Activity 2: The care and feeding of your autistic child
Supplies: Your family’s monthly income

Got a kid on the Spectrum? If so, it's best to go organic to avoid all those pesky toxins! Plus, you’ll eventually try the gluten-free/casein free diet you swore you'd never do. No wheat? No dairy? This sounds like a piece of cake, right? But hey, not so fast, there, slick. Your kid can’t have cake.

Not sure where to start? Here is a simple exercise to help you:

Add up your family’s monthly income. Estimate 10%. Drive to Whole Foods and give the store manager the other 90%.

Wondering how your child will react to the change? Try this exercise guaranteed to simulate the experience:

Inform your husband that he is now a vegan. Then spend the next several years trying to find things that he’ll eat while his friends, coworkers and family continue to enjoy the foods now verboten. Explain to him that he likes being a vegan and how it’s for his own good. Find him one day hiding behind a tree eating a Whopper that he paid the neighbor’s wife to pick up for him.

Readiness Activity 3: Leaving the house with your autistic child
Supplies: That horrible woman who works in the Wicker Park branch of the Chicago Post Office, any child, some cash.

Pay the child five dollars to misbehave in the Post Office. When the woman yells at your child and calls you a bad mother, react in a way you naturally would, that is to say with tears or silent gall. Then go home. If you are shaking, have a glass of wine.

Repeat activity until a.) this woman’s judgment doesn’t bother you or b.) you’ve come up with a response that drives her to tears and makes the other people in the Post Office applaud. (Word of caution, this has never been done.)

Start a blog so that you can say all the things you wish you’d said behind her back on the Internet.

Readiness Activity 4: The new you
Suppies: A recent photo of yourself, some markers, tape

Your child with autism will be quite the little night owl! Your pediatrician will recommend lots of books about how getting your child to sleep is all a matter of will, but none of those things will work. He or she will have no other ideas. So how do you prepare?

Lay the picture of yourself flat on the table in front of you. Use the red markers to color in the whites of your eyes. Next, locate the marker that most closely resembles your hair color and draw in limp, greasy locks that stick out in various directions. Use your purple marker to draw bags under your eyes.

Tape the picture on your bathroom mirror, roughly at eye level. After a few months, the varying temperatures and steam of the bathroom will cause the picture to fall from the mirror and voila! There you are! The resemblance will be uncanny!

Readiness Activity 5: Parenting your autistic child
Supplies: A brick wall

Do you have certain expectations for your child? Will you be sure to raise a polite little gentleman? The kind who uses his inside voice or sweetly keeps from kicking the seat in front of her? Not so fast! Your kid will be the one prostrate in the parking lot for 20 minutes because the grocery cart he wants to ride in is broken. The brick wall activity is excellent practice for all of your future interactions.

Step 1:  Standing near a wall, ask it to do things, such as go to sleep, put on its jacket, turn off the TV, talk, stop screaming about the tags in its shirt bothering it, pay attention, react when you call its name, sit for circle time, follow directions, just be flexible for once, use its words instead of having a tantrum.

Step 2:  Be sure to take careful notes about the times you are able to get your wall to do your bidding.

Step 3:  Bang head against wall.

Step 4: Repeat steps 1-3 for eighteen years.

Activity 6: Talking to your pediatrician about your child's medical needs
Supplies: A collapsed coal mine, trapped miners

Think your pediatrician will help you navigate the world of autism? Think again! You’re on your own! How do you prepare for the herculean task of trying to recover your child? Try this:

Find a collapsed mine full of trapped miners. Get them out yourself.

:::

Congratulations!

You’ve successfully completed the Punchdrunk Autism Readiness Program! It’s time for you to have a glass of Target wine and simmer under your barely suppressed rage while all of the “experts” disagree over the nature, severity and cause of your child’s illness, and whether your child is ill at all.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

And if you're looking for ways to help during Autism Awareness Month, here are some ways to contribute:

http://www.tacanow.org

http://www.generationrescue.org

http://www.operationautismonline.org (Psst, those guys help military families!)

http://www.autismone.org